Monthly Archives: September 2009

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That’s My Face! Fabbing company will print you a 3D mask

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Blogging serendipity strikes again – when talking about the “Earth Brooches” from Fluid Form the other week, I made a throwaway comment about near-future costume-parties where everyone would be dressed with a photorealistic mask of whichever celebrities had licensed their faces for such commercial use (and, doubtless, a fair few who hadn’t).

That's My Face portrait mannequin and source photosWell, turns out that wasn’t the weirdest idea I’ve ever had… or at least that I’m not the only person to have it. Via Fabbaloo comes word of a service calling itself That’s My Face!, which does exactly that – send them a couple of photos of your face (or, presumably, anyone else’s), and they’ll turn them into a 3D image before printing them off in a variety of different sizes and formats, from a full-size life-mask portrait to a custom-made posable action figure (no, really). They even offer the facility to mess with the images, changing the apparent age, gender or race of the subject.

Obviously, That’s My Face’s products aren’t going to fool the border guards of your local totalitarian state or the security systems of your rogue cybernetics corporation at the moment, but they’re a proof-of-concept for realistic full-face masks based on photographs… and another chunk chipped away from the notion of visual appearance having any solid bearing on identity. So much for photographic ID, huh?

It strikes me that with a few advances in materials as well as 3D printing, the next evolution of this technology could be a sort of non-permanent cosmetic surgery – go in to the clinic, have your face scanned, make some adjustments with the help and advice fo the friendly consultant, and then have your modified features sprayed on top of the ones you were born with. When you get bored with it, wash it off with the supplied solvent and head back for your new face-of-the-week…

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Project Icarus: an eye in the sky for just $150

The popped Project Icarus balloon on its way back to EarthIf the $8000 TubeSat kits we mentioned last month are still to pricey for your pocketbook, never fear – you can still muck about on the edge of space, provided you can scrape up a few hundred bucks. A group of MIT students under the aegis of the Icarus Project have managed to take digital photographs from 17.5 miles above the surface of the Earth using nothing but off-the-shelf components… for a mere $150. [via Hack A Day]

The GPS receiver was a Motorola i290 “Boost Mobile” prepaid phone with internet and GPS capability (set up with Accutracking to constantly report its GPS location).

We bought a AA-battery cell phone charger to sustain the phone’s power over the duration of the flight, and we used Energizer lithium batteries (rated to operate at temperatures are low as -40F) to power both this charger as well as our camera.

As a further safeguard against electronic/battery failure due to low temperature, we utilitzed Coleman disposable hand warmers (placed near our electronics) to help keep our equipment warm in the cold of the stratosphere.

We loaded a Canon A470 camera (bought used on Amazon) with CHDK open source software to enable a feature which allowed the camera to take pictures continuously (intervalometer). Using this feature, we set the camera to take a picture every 5 seconds at a 1/800 second shutter speed. With an 8GB card, the camera was able to chronicle the whole journey of the balloon from launch to retrieval. (~5 hours)

OK, so it’s not exactly the most complex payload ever sent aloft, but it’s a clear demonstration that ingenuity gets things done… as is the example of Armadillo Aerospace, who’ve just taken the Level 2 prize of $1million for the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge with their Scorpius vehicle.

And given that NASA has been warned that it needs to constrain its goals unless it can increase its budget, that’s good to know; I’m more convinced than ever that the next big steps in space will not be achieved by government agencies, though they may retain a political space on the game-board by commissioning more prize challenges.

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Nanotechnologically self-repairing circuits

selfheal_x220Researchers at the University of Illinois have developed a means by which nanotube-filled capsules could repair electronic circuits when they are damaged:

Capsules, filled with conductive nanotubes, that rip open under mechanical stress could be placed on circuit boards in failure-prone areas. When stress causes a crack in the circuit, some of the capsules would also rupture and release nanotubes to bridge the break.
…
“Many times when a device fails, it’s because a circuit or capacitor burns out,” says Bielawski. “This is critical in situations where you can’t repair it — in satellites or submarines.” To address the problem, engineers currently build redundancy into a system. Self-healing circuits could make devices for remote applications more lightweight, more efficient, and cheaper, says Bielawski.

Consumer electricals have become increasingly cheap and disposable over the past few years. If this technology is adopted widely and improved could it lead to electricals that continue to function well for many decades? It seems unlikely that companies would choose to lose built-in obsolesence as a marketing tool, but if technologies increase in durability and strictly hardware-based improvements tail off (i.e. it becomes more economical to achieve improvements in performance through software tweaks, instead of relying on Moore’s Law) could it be that we find ourselves with the same mobile-phone/$multi-purpose_personal_electronic_widget for many years, which continually repairs and rebuilds itself when damaged?

[from Technology Review][image from Technology Review]

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How to download whole books from Google

Just in case it isn’t obvious: the following is not an incitement to (or endorsement of) copyright infringement; I have decided to publish this link because I know a number of readers here are interested in the legal and commercial future of books in a digital age (as am I), and because the Author’s Guild settlement is a current topic on which it has bearing… and because few things give me more satisfaction than pointing out that Everything Can And Will Be Hacked.

To reiterate: this link is for information purposes only, folks.

How to download full books from Google Books and save them as PDF files